northern fall incoming
Can’t stop loving
Can’t stop what’s on its way
And I see it coming
And it’s on its way*
This project will not save us from flames or superstorms. It will not rescue the forest from the ax. It will not slow climate change.
I am your silence, your
tragedy, your watcher.**
It cannot resurrect the dead.
Though I'm only night, **
It cannot save a species.
though every night of
my life is yours.**
It’s been a remarkable summer.
How can we speak of blood, the sky
is drenched with it.***
This project does not profess heroism. It is not about safety or salvation.
It is about extinct geographies, extinction’s geographies, geographies after extinction1
It is about social-ecological landscapes of fear2
A hiccoughing heartsense—
a cataract filming over/my inner eyes
…a plain,
only green tree-flowers***
It is about haunting
Ghost knows. Ghost tells us.
What’s happening, How did it come to pass, What does it mean3
Haunting tells us to seek the marginal utopias there in our pausing.
The ghost we cannot ignore, the haunting that tells us about all the previous ends of the world and whose histories we lost and who survived and still carries these histories.
we love the dark. It has heard our voice****
Delisted 2023 brings you into relation to these other beings, to sense time out of joint, to sit with the grief, to not do but to be. You are not alone.
Delisted 2023 is about experiencing grief in community, and encountering, as a result, the holy shit moment of awe.
Delisted 2023 knows all of us, creature, plant, collapse together in the same origins, the same ancestor. Delisted 2023 sees expanse where politics, law, certain cultural narratives of dominance see contraction, simplification, small closed nows.
Delisted 2023 is entanglement, discomfort, opacity, messiness. It’s slow.
Through cracks Delisted 2023 provides space for the brilliance of the living earth throughout time not as only loss, but as awe. It is a sharp rebuttal to isolation and loneliness.
They missed each other. The missing grew large between them*****
How our loneliness derives from our forgetting, in those small closed nows, the tearing false urgencies, that tree knows me.
What are those flowers that are
My favorite ones? They are everywhere here******
To feel incapable, incompetent, to feel bereft. To be broken, your edges unsealed your body in view, the edges of your mind your intellect. The fog rolling in, filming over the inner eye or the idea of being rational never quite meeting the rational moment. Dissonance, the gas lighting of fireburn ashes for those who can see them in moment of safety, separate as they may be by certain accidents or purposeful contexts, the heart of the matter, the nothing feeling right if it ever did. To be in time, once the world was so very hot and we were all together in one body, pearly mussels, and plants, catamount, o’o’, human, that moment is now, that moment is over, and comes again, as does, and did, and will, this moment of rupture.
The beating heart of possibility that survives with us here in the violent cataclysm of modernity.
Note: I draw from Avery Gordon’s work on haunting as expressed in Ghostly Matters, The Hawthorn Archive and other works
Quotes
*Tori Amos, Bells for Her.
**Alexandra Piznarik tr. Yvette Siegert, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972.
***Denise Levertov, Relearning the Alphabet.
****Anne-Marie Turza, Fugue with Bedbug.
*****Brigit Pegeen-Kelly, Song.
******Paul Hlava Ceballos, banana[]
B. Garlic, K. Symons (2020), Geographies of Extinction. Environmental Humanities 1:296.
G.J. Gadsden, N. Golden, N. C. Harris (2023), Place-Based Bias in Environmental Scholarship Derived from Social-Landscapes of Fear, BioScience 73: 23.
Avery Gordon (2011), Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity, Borderlands 10:1.